Football cards

The first British company to issue football cards was W.D. & H.O. Wills. The first card appeared in 1887 and were at first used to advertise its products. Ogdens, a company based in Liverpool, introduced thefirst series of cigarette cards in 1894. This series of photographic cards became known as “Guinea Golds”.

As Gordon Howsden points out in his book, Collecting Cigarette and Trade Cards: “At a time when the average family could not afford books, and with the technique of reproducing photographs in newspapers still some years away, these cards could inform and amuse, and bring a little bit of colour into what were all too often very drab lives.”

Arnold Bennett once remarked that “some boys will grow up with cigarette cards as their sole education”. Another writer, Clifford Hough, pointed out that cigarette cards were dubbed “The Working Man’s Encyclopedia” because “they brought pictures of famous faces and fascinating places to the attention” of the masses. Hough adds that on “the reverse side the captions contained many interesting facts and pieces of information that often sunk into a boy’s mind to a greater extent than any dull textbook from schooldays.”

Nowadays Football Cards are predominately traded from manufactuers such as Topps Football web site for Topps Match Attax trading cards, play tournaments and championships with premier league collectable football cards.